You'd expect the gentlest, most accommodating Tantric school to travel best to the modern West. Wallis argues the opposite: the school best suited to 21st-century Westerners is the Krama — the most radical, most nondual, most transgressive of them all.1 His thesis is direct: "I would argue that the Krama is the Tantrik school par excellence, the consummation of the tradition... the most transcendent of the cultural framework that birthed it."2 The very feature that made it radical in medieval India — its ferocious independence from the surrounding culture — is exactly what makes it portable now. A teaching that already freed itself from its own culture's programming is the one most able to free you from yours.
This is Wallis's concluding recommendation: of all the Tantric lineages, the Kaula Krama (also called the Mahārtha) is the one modern Westerners could practice most authentically.3 His reasons stack up:
The counterintuitive heart of the argument is that radical and portable are the same property seen from two angles. Recall the culture-to-transcend problem: Tantric initiation was calibrated to erase the specific ego built by a specific culture (Veda-determined India), so transplanting it requires re-tailoring to erase a different culture's programming. Most schools were deeply wired into medieval Indian social structure — caste rules, gender restrictions, ritual obligations — which means importing them drags all that cultural baggage along.
The Krama had already done the hardest part: it had already transcended its own culture's programs. It rejected caste, empowered women, initiated outsiders, and centered its practice not on culture-specific rituals but on the universal process of cognition — something every conscious being does regardless of where or when they live. So a teaching built around "watch how any mind constructs experience" doesn't need re-tailoring for the West, because it was never tailored to India in the first place; it operates one level beneath culture, at the structure of consciousness itself. The school's radical independence wasn't a quirk — it's what made its core teaching culture-neutral, and culture-neutral is exactly what survives transplantation. The most rooted-in-its-time schools are the least transportable; the one that floated freest of its time floats freest into ours.
This recommendation is the payoff of several threads: the culture-to-transcend problem (the Krama solves it by being pre-detached), the Dzogchen convergence (a living sister tradition for those who resonate), and the modern-practice caveats (the Krama's chummā-centered, ritual-optional form eases the access burden). It rests on the Krama's own history of women gurus and cognition-worship, and connects to the modern survival of Śaiva Tantra.
The Krama's distinctive practice — worshipping the phases of cognition themselves — is what makes Wallis's "universal" claim concrete, and it's worth seeing why it travels where caste-bound ritual can't.
Most Tantric practice summons a particular deity into a particular substrate using a particular culturally-loaded mantra and form. The Krama's deepest practice is different: it's a meditation on the process by which any cognition arises, persists, and dissolves — the creation/stasis/dissolution in every act of knowing. Every sentient being, in every culture, in every century, does this — perceives, holds, releases — thousands of times a day. So a practice built on watching and divinizing that universal process needs no cultural translation. A 12th-century Kashmiri and a 21st-century New Yorker have different gods, different taboos, different social identities — but the structure of a single moment of perception is identical in both. The Krama located the sacred in that structure rather than in any culture's furniture. This is why Wallis can say its analysis "applies to all sentient beings": it's not a teaching about India that must be ported, but a teaching about consciousness that India happened to discover first. The case study shows the deep reason a radical school is the portable one — by stripping away everything culture-specific (which is what made it radical), the Krama arrived at a practice with nothing left to translate.
For a modern seeker choosing among Tantric streams, the practical implications. Prefer the cognition-centered over the ritual-centered. If elaborate daily ritual is a barrier (it is, for most modern lives), the Krama's chummā-and-cognition focus offers a real practice that doesn't require the three-hour rite — though the chummās still must be received from a qualified teacher and worked in community, not self-administered from a book. Expect a tradition built to include you. The Krama's history of empowering women and initiating non-Indians means a Westerner (especially a woman) isn't bending a reluctant tradition to fit — they're entering one already shaped to receive them. Use the living sister tradition as a bridge. If you resonate with the Krama's View but find no living Krama lineage (likely), a good Dzogchen or Mahāmudrā teacher offers an intact, transmitting lineage pointing at nearly the same recognition. Practice at the level of cognition. The portable core is watching how each moment of experience arises, holds, and dissolves — the universal process — rather than chasing culture-specific deity-forms; that's the part that needs no translation.
Self-administered chummās (skipping transmission). Drawn by the "ritual-optional" framing, you treat the chummās as aphorisms to contemplate solo from a book. But Wallis is explicit: they work only if "properly received from a qualified teacher and worked with in the context of a community of initiates." The tell: collecting Krama power-statements as inspirational quotes, expecting the result that only live transmission and community deliver.
Mistaking radical for permissive. You hear "most transgressive, most radical" and read it as "anything goes / no discipline." But the Krama's radicalism is transcendence of cultural programming, not abandonment of rigor — its analysis of cognition is the most sophisticated, the most demanding. The tell: using "the Krama is the radical one" to license a loose, undisciplined, transgression-for-its-own-sake practice the school's actual depth would never endorse.
Wallis's concluding argument, stated as personal thesis ("I would argue") and promising fuller treatment "in another publication."8 The honest tension: Wallis recommends the Krama as best suited to modern Westerners while the companion afterword makes clear the Krama is among the most attenuated and nearly-extinct of the schools — its rituals, yoga, and transgressive teachings largely forgotten even in Kashmir. So the school he calls most practicable for Westerners may be the one with the least intact living transmission to practice it through. The open question this exposes: is "the Krama is best for Westerners" a recommendation you can actually act on, or an argument for why, lacking a living Krama lineage, the honest move is its living sister tradition (Dzogchen) — making the Krama recommendation as much an intellectual identification of the ideal as a practicable path?
A tension runs between Wallis's two roles here — the historian and the advocate — and it's productive. As historian, he's documented that the Krama "did not survive," crushed by brāhmin patriarchy, Muslim conquest, and false-guru abuse, its esoteric ethos "too radical to persist." As advocate, he names that same dead school the "consummation of the tradition" and the best fit for modernity. These don't contradict so much as reveal his actual claim: the Krama failed in its own time precisely because it was ahead of it — too egalitarian, too independent, too radical for medieval India to tolerate. Pull on that and the recommendation flips into something poignant and sharp: the school that medieval India couldn't sustain is the one modernity is finally ready for, because the values that got it destroyed (gender equality, rejection of caste, freedom from cultural programming) are values the modern West already holds. The historian's "it died because it was too radical" and the advocate's "it's best for now" are the same observation read forward in time — a teaching can be killed by being early, and then vindicated by the world catching up to it. Which raises the stakes of the revival question: reviving the Krama wouldn't be restoring a relic but completing something history interrupted.
The plain link: this is an argument about what makes a teaching portable across cultures — which connects to the psychology of universal vs. culture-bound processes and to the behavioral dynamics of why radical groups get suppressed.
The Sharpest Implication If the Tantric school best suited to the modern West is one that was destroyed in its own time for being too radical, then "fit for an era" and "survivable in an era" are different things — and a teaching can be simultaneously the most valuable and the most fragile, killed precisely by the qualities that make it precious. The destabilizing part: the values that got the Krama exterminated (gender equality, the rejection of caste, freedom from cultural programming) are now mainstream Western values, which means the world didn't reject those values as wrong — it just wasn't ready, and readiness is a function of time, not truth. That should unsettle any confidence that the best ideas win. The Krama lost. It lost to power, not to error. And its possible revival now isn't because anyone refuted its destroyers — it's because the social order that couldn't tolerate it eventually changed. Which suggests the seeker drawn to it is participating less in preserving a tradition than in vindicating one that history cut down early — and that the deepest, most liberating teachings may routinely be the ones that arrive before their world can hold them.
Generative Questions